


Finding Music

by celticvampriss



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: F/M, Modern AU, Rivetra Week, Soulmate AU, rivetra
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-29
Updated: 2015-05-29
Packaged: 2018-04-01 19:53:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,030
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4032544
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/celticvampriss/pseuds/celticvampriss
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A variation of the soulmate AU where you don’t see color until you find your soulmate and I changed it to: you don’t hear music until you meet your soulmate.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Finding Music

**Author's Note:**

> Rivetra Week prompt: Music. Soulmate AU. Modern.

For some, it never happened.  They didn’t need it and their lives never felt inadequate or lacking.  Levi was sure he fit into that group.  He had never once in his entire life heard a sound that wasn’t noise, but that wasn’t why his life was shit.  It was more likely to him that he was just a shitty person reaping their deserved consequences.  Maybe he was only ever meant to be like this.  To hear the world in clashing tones and glaring sonance. 

Levi tucked his hands further into the pockets of his jacket and slouched into the bus bench.  Noise.  The groan of traffic.  The chatter of people walking by.  All of it was so utterly pointless he almost wished he didn’t have to hear them either.  Like, fuck, every single voice came together in a blatant refusal to be anything other than vibrations in the air. 

He started up a game on his phone, anything to distract him, and then something caught his attention.  He but his phone down, looking side to side for a source.  It was so quiet, he probably imagined it.  A trick of his brain.  To be honest, he had no idea what it even was because he had never heard it before.

Minutes went by and he couldn’t place it.  He checked his phone, the bus was late, and tried to ignore that he could still hear it, somewhere, like a faint whisper from too far away.  It was incessant, but not in a bad way.  A sound that he could not ignore, but that he couldn’t place no matter how hard he listened.  He closed his eyes.

It got louder.  Only just.  He stood up.  His bus passed over his stop.

Louder again.  If he could bottle up that sound and put it on repeat he’d never remove it from his ears.  Levi started walking, picking random directions until one of them made the sound clearer.  Then he chased it.

The streets were crowded with mid-day traffic, the stop and flow of cars timed with the rush crossing of pedestrians.  Levi weaved through, ignoring protests, always looking—another instance where he wished he could be taller—and still the sound grew louder.  There was a part of him that knew exactly what was happening.  It seemed too much to ask for now, of all times, but this had to be it.

He scanned the crowd.  He used a bench—kicking someone’s bag out of his way—and in the crowd his saw a head.  A copper haired woman walking toward the subway station.  He didn’t know how he knew, but he was certain.  She was the source.  She was the sound.  She was the music.

When his eyes had found her it triggered something.  All at once that music he was chasing stopped and in it’s place, the world started up again.  The noise he’d heard all his life, like he had been rewired, was suddenly harmony.  Some of it was still noise, but in between he could hear so much that he’d missed before, that he just could not process. 

The light changed and the woman was crossing the street.  He jumped down and tried to reach her, but she never stopped.  Wait.  Why didn’t she stop?  Why wasn’t she looking for him too?  Couldn’t she hear it?  He didn’t want to dwell on the implications if she couldn’t, so he channeled this thoughts into reaching her.  But it would not have been the first time someone had found their music and their source to find it in someone else.  It happened.  Rarely, but it did.  If he was finally going to hear it, might as well be one-sided.  It was oddly comforting because that vague disappointment was familiar.  The letdown was almost anticipated.

“Hey!”  He tried to call her, but she was always just out of reach and made no reaction to his shouting.  Others did and he ignored them and their comments.  She was walking fast through the throng of people.  He had to come to a sudden stop at a crosswalk, halted by the light.

“Shit.”  Cars were passing by the intersection while she walked on across the street.  He jammed the button over and over, waiting for it to change.  He walked up to the curb and when he dared to look away from her, he counted the seconds between cars and ran.  Horns flared up in his wake, sudden bursts of high, long notes in a cascading harmony, but Levi was fast and confident and he’d run through worse.

She headed down into the subway tunnels.  He followed.  When, finally, he was inches from her he tried to get her attention again, holding out a hand but not thinking it wise to actually touch her from behind like that.  He raised his voice above the echoing roar of train engines.  “Hey.  Miss.”  She swiped her metro card and kept walking.  “Wait.  Wa—fuck.”

He unclenched his fists and fished out his wallet.  Metro card.  Metro card.  He slid it from its holder and scanned it as he walked into the turnstyle.  It was still locked.  The fuck.  He swiped the card again, quickly, but was still locked out.

_Available balance of $0.45._

“Mother fucker.”  He didn’t have time to go to the machine and recharge the damn thing.  He stuffed it into a pocket.  The woman had already left his sight, going down another flight of stairs where he had no idea which train she would be taking.  There must have been some amount of fate on his side, because a woman with a stroller was about to exit through the emergency door.  In this kind of crowd it was impossible to get caught if you knew what you were doing.  Levi slipped inside before it could close and raced to the stairs the woman had descended.

Again he found her, waiting outside the C Train stop.  She had set down her bag on her boots and took out her cell phone.

He could pick out the notes now.  The voices around him, the mundane clatter, there were songs in there.  Scales.  Ranges and pitches.  He did not have an idea of what to call them, only that he could hear them now.  And it was amazing that anyone lived without it.

Now that she was stopped, he wasn’t sure how to approach her.  He hadn’t caught her attention and he was certain now that he was the only one hearing the music.  If she could hear it, she would not be standing there so calmly, as if the entire world hadn’t just suddenly changed.  Still.  He had to know her name.  He had to say something.

He cleared his throat, loudly.  She didn’t react.  He didn’t want to hover too closer to her like some kind of creep, so he hung back like an awkward creep.  He could see her face now, from the side, the short copper hair tucked behind an ear.  Of course, she was cute.

She turned her head suddenly, looking down the track absently to check on the train.  With the motion her eyes moved to him, meeting his gaze and pausing.  She smiled.

He didn’t smiled.  But he felt something turn over in his chest, something profound.  For a long time he stared at her, until he could manage a wave.

She waved back, shaking her head and laughing very softly.  God.  He had never heard laughter before, not truly.  Or maybe that was just her, but he could see himself doing near anything to hear it again.

“You don’t hear it.”  He said, catching her eyes again.  “Do you?”

She was staring at his lips and when he finished speaking, her smile grew.  She began signing to him, though at first he didn’t know what she was doing.  When it clicked his heart plummeted.  Of all the languages he didn’t speak.  He had picked up three or four out of necessity, but ASL was not one of them.

“You can’t hear.”  he said, stupidly, insensitively, and for once he fucking cared.

The woman shook her head.

“Well fuck.”

She laughed softly again.  Then started signing to him.

He shook his head.  “No, I don’t…I don’t understand.”  He was frustrated.  Why hadn’t he ever learned ASL?  Why did he not consider this as a possibility?  He felt unprepared.  And it occurred to him that someone that beautiful didn’t need to be bothering with him.  She had paused when he looked away, waiting for him to face her again, a slight frown breaking up that sunshine smile.  Fuck.  Duh.  He was seriously an asshole.

He needed to leave, but not without asking her one thing.  “What’s your name?”

She brightened and pulled out a notebook and pen.  When she finished writing she held it out to him.

“Petra.”  He read, though her looping bubbly letters were hardly legible.

She nodded happily, reading her name from his lips.

“Levi.”  He said, lamely.  Like she needed to know it or something.  “Sorry for bothering you.”  He wanted to make a quick retreat, but she motioned for him to stop.  He did.

She thought for a second, biting her tongue, and then she wrote on her notepad, flipping a page and writing some more.

 _It’s hard to explain.  Can I borrow your hand?_   Read the first page.

He looked up again and hesitantly held out his hand for her.  She took his wrist and tugged it forward, placing his palm over her heart, just under the edge of her jacket.

With her free hand she flipped to the second page.

_I don’t hear it, no, but I can feel it.  If that makes sense.  I can’t call it music.  Maybe rhythm?  You’re very cute, by the way.  
_

He read over her words, trying to decipher what she was trying to say when he could hardly think.  He barely grasped any of it once he read that last sentence and his fingers were being pressed very gently into the folds of her coat.  “I heard music, you can feel it?”

She released his arm and made a “more or less” gesture, twisting her hand palm down at the wrist.  She kept him there until her train and without even trying convinced him to board with her.  Whatever he had meant to be doing was no longer important.  Sitting side by side on the train, Petra continued to write to him in her notebook and he would type his response into his phone.  They nearly missed her stop.

–

Now that music was something he could grasp, Levi picked it up quickly, learning to play and learning to compose.  He would never have thought it of himself.  He’d always thought that he didn’t need music, that he could live without it, because he didn’t have a soul mate.  He hadn’t deserved one.  Or she was from another time and he’d missed her.  Or his soul just didn’t need something like love.  When he started buying up instruments and records and speakers and anything he could do to consume this new medium, it was an odd thing that he was actually one of the few who needed music.  He had a natural talent for it, like his soul couldn’t survive without it.  Without her.  He imagined that all those years he’d spent believing the worst, he’d been slowly losing himself, draining away.  Now he could live.

Petra still could not hear music the same way.  He had to hum the songs into her mouth, her neck, or play notes with his fingers into her skin.  She felt it when he whispered against her lips.  When he played instruments she experienced the sound in a way he never could and that she claimed had never happened before she had seen him on that subway platform. 

What was more unexpected than any of it, was that as much as he had come to enjoy the music in his life, he’d gladly go back if it meant he could be with Petra.  Even if he had never started hearing the music at all, he would have loved her.


End file.
